Functions of Language 12:1 (2005), 87–24. issn 0929–998X / e-issn 1569–9765 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Acts and the relationship between discourse and grammar* Mike Hannay and Caroline Kroon Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam In modelling the discourse–grammar interface, a central question concerns the status of discourse act as the minimal unit of discourse organization and its relation to units of grammatical structure. his paper seeks to clarify the notion of act by defining it as a strategic rather than a conceptual unit, and by setting out a classification of strategic acts. Illustration is then offered for the position that discourse acts are to a very considerable extent realized in English by intonation units and punctuation units. his is done by consider- ing how punctuational variation and cases of intonation/syntax mismatch can be explained in terms of the specific discourse contribution of the units concerned. Although the correlation between discourse acts and intonation/ punctuation units remains problematic, in that there may not be a 1 : 1 cor- respondence, it is still attractive — at least for English — to see the linguistic correlate of acts in intonation and punctuation units rather than in syntactic structures. he paper finishes by considering the implications for the formal- izing of relations between discourse, semantics and syntax in Functional Discourse Grammar. . Introduction A current trend in linguistics involves attempts to link discourse models to sentence models, or the other way round. he discourse–grammar interface is one of the central issues in, for instance, Roulet’s Geneva Discourse Model (henceforth GDM) (for the most recent and most encompassing overview see Roulet, Filliettaz and Grobet 2001) and Hengeveld’s Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) (Hengeveld 2004a, 2004b). In their individual endeavours both models encounter the same kinds of problem. One of the most essential, and most difficult, questions raised is how the minimal unit of discourse or- ganization relates to the maximal unit of grammatical structure. Both models amsterdamnld/12 IP: 146.50.116.76 On: Fri, 04 Aug 2017 13:35:54